housing, and some are homeless. They have inadequate education, inadequate
nutrition, and no health care. They have no possibility of social mobility, and little
chance of achieving the quality of life that most people would consider minimally
acceptable. Most members of the underclass are not born there: They grow up
working poor, or working class, or middle class, and gradually move down through
a series of firings, layoffs, divorces, and illnesses.
America and the Myth of the Middle Class
Generally, Americans believe that class is even less important than ever and that most
Americans are middle class. On the other hand, class inequality has never been greater,
and it is growing wider, not narrower. How can it be both?
Since the turn of the twentieth century, the middle class has expanded dramati-
cally, and the classes of the very rich and the very poor have declined. Home owner-
ship has risen, incomes have risen, and many more people own stock through mutual
funds, pensions, and retirement accounts than ever before. They thus own at least a
fraction of the means of production—and identify not with workers but with owners.
Today most people in the United States define themselves as middle class, even
if they have to resort to creative redefinitions. Forty-second President George W. Bush’s
father was the ambassador to the United Nations, director of the CIA, and finally
president of the United States. Like his father and grandfather, George W. Bush
attended an elite prep school, and graduated from Yale. His family bought him the
Texas Rangers baseball franchise as his first job, and he was elected governor of Texas
before running for president. Yet even he insists that he is middle class!
At the same time that boundaries of the middle class are expanding to the break-
ing point, with almost everyone thinking that they are middle class (or upper middle
class or lower middle class), fully invested in the system, the lifestyle associated with
middle class is in obvious decline: less money, a smaller house or no house, a worse
job or no job, and less financial security.
SOCIAL CLASS 215The Hidden Injuries of Class
In 1969 and 1970, sociologists Richard Sennett and
Jonathan Cobb interviewed working class and poor
men and women whose jobs were difficult, demean-
ing, low-paying, and dead-end. Sennett and Cobb ex-
pected to hear about hardship and deprivation, but
they also heard working-class men judging them-
selves by middle-class standards. They believed in the American
dream, where a poor boy can grow up to be president, where all
it takes to get rich is perseverance and hard work. Yet they
weren’t rich—and they blamed themselves. They thought their
“failure” was a matter of laziness, lack of ambition, or stupidity.
How did they ward off despair, when they believed themselves
fully to blame for their lives of deprivation? They deferred successfrom their own lives onto the lives of their children. They were
working at difficult, dirty, and dangerous jobs not because they
were failures, but because they were sacrificing to give their chil-
dren a better life. They were noble and honorable. Middle-class
fathers tried to be role models to their children, saying, in effect,
“You can grow up to be like me if you study and work hard.” But
working-class fathers tried to be cautionary tales: “You could grow
up to be like me if you don’tstudy and work hard.”
Living through one’s children proved to be enormously dam-
aging. Fathers were resentful if their children were successful
and perhaps even more resentful if they weren’t, and all of the
deprivation was for nothing. Successful children felt ashamed
of their parents, and unsuccessful children felt guilt and despair
of their own. Following the American Dream can also produce
painful feelings.Sociologyand ourWorld